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Feb 25, 2011

The Meaning of Play

I humbly propose a new theory of what play is....

[edit 28 Feb 11: or do I...?]

I’ve never been fully satisfied with the definitions of ‘play’ and ‘game’ that have currency in Game Studies. Where I really have trouble is when I try to apply them to the fields of ethics and the philosophy of law in which I now tend to write.

In my recent analysis of sports law and the historical relationships between violence, criminal law and governance (focusing on duelling, boxing, rugby etc) I’ve been searching for an explanation of what is going on when sport is left to get on with it - free from ‘magisterial interference’, as the London Prize Ring Rules of 1838 put it.

The cannon of theories all do useful jobs of work, however I feel that none of them successfully identified the correct underlying principles at the heart of play, or at the very least those that are operational when we look at play in respect of law and other forms of institutional power.

It seems to me that one core concept that explains what play is and how it operates should be founded on what’s happening at the semiotic layer. So let’s jump into my proposed definition (that will need a lot of un-packing):

Play is the recognised, negotiated, process of a purposeful shift in the dominant meaning; and contextual attribution of value, of acts.

Games are normative forms of play.

[28 Feb 11 ludic] play-meaning - the meaning that has been shifted or attributed

[28 Feb 11 ludic]play-semiotics - the system of the signs product through play

ludic-capital - the degree to which these ludic-meaning and semiotics are operational in a given context e.g. when set against institutional-capital.

[edit 26 Feb 2011:ludic-intent - the intentional attitude we hold towards acts where the internal meaning and value we attribute to them has primacy over external ones.

ostensible-play or hollow-play - where the intentional attitude that we hold towards acts holds the external value of those acts over the internal values and meanings]

Magic circle - the term we use to denote the bounds of the context wherein the ludic-meaning of an act prevails over the co-existing non-ludic meaning (or lack thereof).

OK, let’s un-box that…

Act

I’m being broad in my use of the word act. I don’t just mean physical things but also, speech, thoughts etc. So I’m including word games and purely cognitive forms of play.

Meaning shifts and recognition

Where I’ve always started puzzling about play is by wondering what it is I recognize when I see play occurring, and how it is that this thing seems to have so much power. Back to my favourite example – in the normal course of events we don’t arrest boxers or rugby players for Battery. So what is it that they are doing that is not the same as people hitting or pushing each other?

Of course, as I covered recently on TN, they are ‘doing’ anything different at all. Rather they, the officials, the sporting bodies, the law, spectators and many that might just happen to see the event attribute a different meaning to the acts.

Moreover, in sport a lot of socio-cultural signalling work goes into pointing out that the acts in question signify something other than we might expect. Language is an important sign - we tend not to talk about rugby players pushing each other, we talk about blocks and tackles. In boxing we talk about jabs and under-cuts. Visual signs are also important - people are wearing unusual clothes, usual ones that are different from ‘ordinary’ ones, they in a marked space during a marked period of time.

What all this is doing is facilitating all relevant parties’ recognition of the meaning shift. Indeed, a more systematic analyses might reveal that there is a correlation between the strength of signalling and gap difference between the juxtaposed meanings i.e. physical contact sports require a lot of signals so we are very sure that they are not ‘just at fight’, whereas playing-field cricket with a tennis ball needs very few signs to protect it form external influence as the what’s at stake when ludic-capital fails to have force are very low.

I also want to note here that ‘recognized’ entails at lest some degree of being ‘conscious of’ – I will pick this point up more in the discussion of ‘purposeful’.

Negotiated process

Factors that are characteristic of the spectrum from free solo play to international sport are the parameters and processes of meaning negotiation.

In solo free play we create meaning: ‘this box is a castle, the cushions are my army, apart from that one I can’t reach, that’s just a cushion’ – here play involves the process of self negotiation of the signs we are attributing to artefacts, thoughts or acts. Knocking something all the way over with a ball might signify that it has been defeated, unless it falls against the sofa and does not fall over – then maybe it is defeated, or maybe it’s just injured and needs another strike to be defeated, maybe that will change in a few minutes etc etc etc.

When two or more people are involved in play they jointly consent to shift meaning and mutually give respect to the shifted meanings through the process described here. This may be a highly formal process involving actual contracts or unspoken and just understood through action. This mutuality is not perfect as the meanings somewhat internal to each individual. This is not a weakness in play or this proposed theory of play - it is an intrinsic characteristic and why negotiation is also intrinsic. Learning this is part of learning how to play.

Hence – when I mention shifted meaning or mutually understood meaning in a play involving more than one person, strictly speaking I’m allowing for non-perfect symmetry of meaning and negotiation processes (but that’s a bit long winded to keep repeating).

So, in some forms of play a sphere is play artefact that should be held or kicked in specific ways, and that getting it through hoop scores a point, and a point is valued more than not-a-point, and that if the ball goes into the road play stops for a while and there’s no advantage to either side because the road is dangerous, so the fact that getting the sphere might be dangerous often prevails over it being a ball (though of course not all the time – an area that’s particularly interesting when we think of injury and liability in ARGs and games that utilise the built environment).

This goes all the way to tacking someone in a game of rugby which can only be done in a certain way, too near to the head and it’s not a tackle, it’s ludic-meaning gives way to it’s non-ludic one: it’s an attack, or at least there will be some form of negation over the dominant meaning – ranging from unspoken thoughts and looks thought to court cases. For American readers - the NFL have recently re-interpreted what are “egregious and elevated hits”, issuing fines to those that fell foul of the new rules (http://www.nfl.com/news/story/09000d5d81b732df/article/anderson-on-flagrant-hits-no-new-rules-just-more-enforcement).

Dominant meaning

So, the process of negotiation is one of establishing which meaning; among many possibilities, is the dominant meeting to be attributed to a given type and token of act. In games and sport where this is well established, the emphasis of negotiation is in on whether individual acts fall within the parameters mutually agreed for the given type of act.

It is critical to note that the dominant meaning of an act for any given person or institution co-exists with other meanings, both those that are produced through play e.g. ‘I thought the ball was out if it was on the line’; and those that pre-existed e.g. ‘the man hit the other man’. The meanings given primacy and dominance through play exist in a complex, sometimes co-constructive, relationship to these other meanings. A relationship that can shift over time for any given act – see below for a little more on this.

Attribution where non existed

By ‘shift in meaning’ I include both: a shift from a previously understood meaning to a new one; and, a shift form there being no previous meaning, or an extremely diverse set, to a new mutually recognized. For example a sphere going through a hoop or between piece of wood tends to have no generally understood meaning – but in many games a very central and important mean is attributed to it.

Purposeful

As noted above the recognition of meaning shift implies that there is some consciousness of the process that is occurring. More than this, the process of meaning shift does not just happen to be occurring, people are actively doing it. So, to be playing you have to know you are playing – you can involve other people, such as in many Alternative Reality Games, but they them selves are not players unless they gain awareness of the game.

One of boundaries of my proposed definition is probably animal play and play in early childhood, as here I’m not sure what should be said about the nature of recognition or purpose as this gets into theories of self consciousness. I’ll probably defer to Winnicott here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnicott).

Dominant .. contextual attribution of valuation

Meaning and value are inter-twined, but in defining play it is worth recognizing what is happening to each. I’ve covered meaning so now let’s look at value.

Contextual attribution is where we are giving primacy to the internal value of an act rather than the externalities. Like with meaning, both exist and may be recognized, but are not on equal footing. So, running with a ball and kicking it though a net have the contextual values of being a goal, changing the score and determining which team may win. They may also keep one fit, make on happy, earning a living etc. Indeed these may be a motivation to play, but they are contingent to what play is.

This is important because there are things that look very much like play but are not play. For instance getting on a bus and taking a bit of paper from a bus conductor has many characteristics of play: the conductor wears a uniform, they give you a bit of paper you both call a ‘ticket’, the ticket has meaning within the context of the bus journey etc. However, in this case the value of the meaning shift (e.g. from bit of paper to ticket) is primarily instrumental, whereas one might play a game of collecting the very same tickets and seeing how many of what colour ink one could get.

What’s not in the definition?

The definition of play and game I’m proposing is one that characterises a process. This is because, like some others, I think there are attributes that are very often products of play or generally associated with it that are not themselves intrinsic to it.

One issue with many definitions of play is that they sought to draw a bright line between play and not play. This definition tries not to do that. The shift and primacy of meaning and value is to a dominant role. One thing that is important about this distinction is that the other meanings and values do not go away. A push in rugby is still a push - it’s just that in many contexts it makes very little sense (but still some sense) to try to give primacy to that interpretation (see Peter Ludlow’s From Sherlock and Buffy to Klingon and Norrathian Platinum Pieces: Pretense, Contextalism, and the Myth of Fiction for more on this kind of thing in a philosophy of language style http://alphavilleherald.com/images/various/Fiction.rtf).

From another perspective it is worth nothing that under this definition, play is a process that co-exists with many other things. We may be playing world of Warcraft at the same time that we are talking on the phone or doing our day-to-day job, but the meaning shift that is going on in respect of pixels and xp is still occurring.

That is play is something that when doing we are also not doing.

We can be playing and thinking about our tax return, which is not play. So the dominance of meaning, or the ludic-capital of play, is not absolute. In the case of a sport, especially highly organized sport, ludic-capital tends to be fairly well signalled and bounded in space and time. Though there are still areas ripe for negotiation e.g. the player that hits another player just after the final whistle – the type of case where the lack of an absolute notion is clear as the socially constructed understanding of the act and the relative power of institutional v. ludic capital will determine which meaning prevails, till the case goes to appeal…

Dear Thomas

And this all ways brings my back to a conversation I’ve been having for years with the esteemed Dr Malaby, see:

Thomas and I agree on a lot of things. In particularly Malaby explicitly resists the notion of play as a exception and thinks of it as process. Initially I thought that adding ludic intentionality to Malaby’s definition would make it fit for purpose, but that felt wrong as the notion of ludic is part of what one is trying to define. What’s more I feel that the focus on ‘contingency’ is useful, but meaning is where the action is at.

Putting the definition to work

I’m now going to apply the definition I’ve proposed to a set of related concepts and debates about play. Given the space I’ve already taken up this is going to be really superficial but will indicate the direction in which I’m thinking and the way I apply the theory – of course, you might buy it but apply it completely differently. I kinda hope you do.

Game

The definition of play that I’ve proposed includes the idea of value. I believe that games and sport are forms of play. Hence in the discussion above I have tended to move between them in the examples given.

As asserted above: Games are normative forms of play. What I mean by this is that in what one might dangerously term pure-play the values that are given to meaning have significance in respect to the in-play and not-play contexts but much less significance, in terms of ranking, in respect of each other. In games the relative value of meanings within the context of play are very important. So the difference between the ball going through the hoop and not going through it is characteristic of a form of game. That is, the norms in question that are the defining characteristic between play and game are internal to the game. It may be, and very often is the case, that these norms gain external recognition (indeed I’ve argued that they can become moral norms: MMO’s as Practices: http://www.mendeley.com/research/mmos-as-practices/) but that’s not an intrinsic quality.

This tends to lead to codification in the form of rules and governance. But it is not, as some might argue, the rules that are important but the play norms that they codify. Similarly it’s not the outcome of a game, as such, that is an essential characteristic but the possibility of an outcome distinct from another. I realize I’m splitting hairs here.

Like most other things here this difference between play and game has its clear-cut cases but as a general matter is somewhat fluid as the relative normative value of something within play might ebb and flow, so we might just play within the context of a game and play might turn into a game, it’s all about emphasis and primacy at any given time.

Law

The definition of play I’m proposing stems from my long discussions about the notion of play and latterly my reading of sports law. Hence where it fits very well is in the area of law and ethics as both of these are, and can be seen to be when one examines the rhetoric, rooted in meaning – often played out in terms of metaphor.

Hence I think that the idea of social-cultural shifts that mean that certain meanings just don’t get traction in an institutional context does explain the mechanics of what is going on in sport and, what should go on in law and computer games (part of the subject of a book I’m currently working on with de Zwart and Humphries).

Play and Playful

There is a continuum from being playful to play. In playfulness the shifted meaning is only partially or fleetingly dominant or is merely a peer of other meanings, hence playfulness can be easy to shift in and out of.

Fun

The definition does not require play to be fun [edit 26 Feb 2011: see my comment here for clafrication that forced play is hollow-play or ostensible-play].

or even voluntary. Someone might be forced to play at gun-point a game that causes them physical pain. Take football as an example - in respect of the process, the thing they are doing would still meet all the criteria above, sphere as ball, points etc etc thought I can see an argument about dominance of externality in this special case.

Why do we play?

I don’t know. The definition I propose seeks only to provide what I think are the intrinsic characteristics of what play is. There are deep psychological and social reasons for why we play and how we play, I suggest readers look at Sutton Smith and others for these. I’m not sure my definition even helps understand these motivations, but I hope that my emphasis of meaning helps.

Why does play ‘work’ ?

Again, I don’t really know, but I do have some thoughts about why play and so-called gamification have an impact on efficiency out outcomes. Basically its about a change of focus and a the relationship between meaning shifting (making) and learning. But more of that in another post…

Why is play and learning so closely aligned?

Because operational knowledge of meanings is intrinsic to play and the process of negotiation of meaning is very intense knowledge work. There's a lot more to be said here.

Can play be work?

Sure. [edit 26 Feb 2011: maybe]

Cheating

Under the definition I have proposed cheating becomes an act related to games which is a wilful corruption of meaning for an end that that simultaneously embraces and undermines the norms in operation. Cheating can be seen as one of the boundary conditions of game.

Narratology vs ludology

I don’t think there is any conflict between my proposed definition and these two ends of the spectrum of approaching play. Stories are engines for creating meaning as is play, they are deeply linked. There’s yet another paper in this I think.

Magic Circle

I believe this definition is compatible with a slightly re-defined notion of the magic circle. Critics of the magic circle seem to want to get rid of it in totality because, I think they see it as too absolute and rigid. I think we need to be less literal about Huizinga. As I’ve noted above play is co-existent with other activities this does not in any way reduce the fact of play nor the ludic-capital in respect of, say, institutional power. So the magic circle still seems a very good way of picking out a conceptual space in which play occurs and some of the characteristic of that space.

Conclusion

I submit that many other definitions of play have great value. I propose that the definition I have provided here has utility partially in the fields of law and ethics. To be less modest I hope I have picked out the intrinsic features of play that underlie previous definitions and thus have provided…. One definition to rule them all :)

This is starting to feel like most of a paper and the start of a book so I’ll be very interested in feedback.

[edit 28 Feb 2011

Much thanks to all those that referenced Goffman in their comments. While I was aware of Goffman and a vague notion of frames, well ‘contextual frames’ was what I had in mind, I had not gone back to source. Doing so was a frankly uneasy experience as I found from reading Goffman that my view of play is not only a bit like his, it’s uncannily like it – he uses pretty much the same logic, the same distinctions, the same examples. It was kinda freaky reading it. I came to the initial conclusion that while I still think my analysis is pretty darn clever given I’d not read anything like it, it might be that Goffman has said everything already, so it was pure re-invention on my part. This moved me from uneasy to positively queasy.

I’ve now read a good chunk of Goffman and a bit of secondary writing, and I’m hoping there are some Goffman (Goffmonians?) scholars around that can help me out.

First, let’s revise some Goff..

In text below I’m quoting from the following edition of Goffman’s 1974 work: Goffman, E., Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience, Northeastern University Press 1986.

Early on Goffman defines ‘frame’ as: “I assume that definitions of a situation are built up in accordance with principals of organization which govern events – at least social one – and our subjective involvement in them; frame is the word I use to ref to such of these basic elements as I am able to identify” (ibid pp. 10 -11)

Later he talks about a concept called ‘keying’ which he says come in 5 types (ibid pp. 46 – 77):

Make-believe

Contests

Ceremony

Technical re-doings

Regroundings

Furthermore keying is defined as (ibid p.45)

“a. Systematic transformation of materials already meaningful…”

“b. Participants in the activity are meant to know and openly acknowledge that a systematic alteration is involved…”

“c. Cues will be available for establishing when the transformation is to begin and when it is to end”

“d. Keying is not restricted to events perceived within any particular class of perspectives”

“e. ...fighting and playing around at checkers feels to be much the same sort of thing…”

Goffman also notes that the activities have a “an inward-looking experiential finality”, and participants might enter into a “meaningful universe sustained by the activity” which we might call a “realm’ or possibly ‘world” (ibid p. 46).

Lastly I want to note where Goffman talks about a given instances of keying when: “during any one occasion participants felt that a particular frame prevailed and could be sustained” (ibid p.54)

Bringing frames and keys (or keying) together Goffman starts to add a few more terms: “Given the possibility of a frame that incorporates keyings, it becomes convenient to think of each transformation as adding a layer… the innermost layering, wherein dramatic activity can be at play to engross the participant. The other is the outer most lamentation, the rim, of the frame, as it were, which tells us just what sort of stat in the real world the activity has, whatever the complexity of the inner lamentations” (ibid p. 82).

Some things to note later in the work are, that dealing with out of frame activities Goffman talks about participants ability to “dissattend” (ibid p.202) i.e. withdrawing attention and awareness (ibid).

Lastly I want to note the notion of Frame Breaking where an individual breaks out of what would be expected within a frame through activities including “Flooding” (ibid p. 350) such as ‘dissolving into laughter or tears” (ibid), this might break the fame not only for them but for others. Goffman also talks about a shifted key where a response creates a sort of feedback loop which and produce an “up keyed” and “down keyed” response. Downkeying being where a play or organized fight gets out of control, Upkeying where things take on a greater sense of unreality e.g. players might start to make larger and larger bets out of all sense of portion (ibid pp 359 – 366).

So, I defined play as “the recognised, negotiated, process of a purposeful shift in the dominant meaning; and contextual attribution of value, of acts.”

I think it would be fair for someone to conclude that I’ve done nothing more than provide an alterative definition of keying and cash things like ‘up keying’ out in very slightly different ways in the context of a limited range of frames i.e. those relating to play, sports etc.

However I don’t read my work as saying exactly the same as Goffman - this is where more knowledgeable scholars need to help me out. Where I see the difference is that in my notion of play I want to put the fluidity of meaning and value, and the continual negotiation of this as central to the theory. I certainly see that there is an overall frame or context in which the play is occurring and that this can be broken by spoil-sports (who break the frame). But the notion of frame, like the notion of magic-circle in the original seems to me to be too rigid to account for the nuance of individual actions and interactions. In a sense I don’t see negotiation as something that is happening just in edge cases and having a binary outcome of play or not-play, rather it seems to me that the process of negotiation is one of the things that is sustaining and re-configuring play at each instant.

But, does anyone read Goffman as saying pretty much the same thing and I’m merely trying to save face (see what I did there) or thinking of the rigidity of frames in the physical world and carrying this over conceptually?]

Comments

1.

I love the serendipitous posting of this article, since I am just finishing up a chapter of my dissertation, one that involves looking at play as it is translated from online experience to physical expressions. I like your analysis and your definition of the playful/play experiences. I too am looking at the moment when playfulness becomes play - I did an analysis of hours of video, looking at facial expressions and body postures of those enticed into the play event. Your direction with this is spot on, based on what i saw in my research. I found in my research that there appears to be a differing expectation of Huizinga's "magic circle" between online play and physical play, where the players organized initially online see more malleable and fluid borders of the experience than do others - as Auge has it, the frontier is not a wall, but a threshold. Well done, and I can't wait to read any follow-up as you continue this.

Denice,
Thanks for the comments, is any of your work published yet, it sounds fascinating. In sideline discussions during the day I've been using the word 'fluid' more and more. Oddly I have Augé next to me (between Politics of Sport and Boxing) as I started to look into the nature of spaces a little, and of course liminality etc. but I did not want to start to load all that into the discussion here - though clearly the inform my thinking.
ren

Ren -- I can't tell you how excited I am to see this today (as well as honored by the engagement in this long conversation, as always. What a fine antidote it is to the sometimes crippling mood that has lately reigned in Wisconsin, where things look so bleak and wintry. I am digging into it and soon will provide a proper reply.
-Thomas

I like this. I particularly like the fact that you keep a concept of the magic circle, which it's fashionable to dismiss but which (as Slowthought points out) is basically Game Studies' way of referring to what Goffman later called "frames". I also like the fact that you recognise that play is a concept in the mind of the individual player, so we could both be playing what we think is the same game but it differs in some details we're not aware of; indeed, it's possible for me to believe I'm playing a game with you when you've stopped playing (eg. hide-and-seek where you couldn't find me so you gave up and went to sleep).

The only place where I disagree with you here concerns whether you can be forced to play something. In my own definition, play is not play when there is duress or obligation involved; the individual is going through the same process as a player, but in my view they are not playing.

I would also quibble as to where to put rules. Your definition places them in games (a particular kind of play) whereas I would place them in play; this is because some non-game play, for example crossword puzzles, also have rules. Do you have any examples of play that doesn't have rules? Even creative play (Sutton-Smith's "play as the imaginary" rhetoric) involves some self-set rules, doesn't it? Or do you mean that games have codified rules?

Something you have which I haven't come across before and which is likely to be very useful is this notion of ludic capital. For wider society to accept a game, the wishes of society are set against the wishes of the players. Sometimes, society wins (Russian Roulette is not acceptable); sometimes, the game wins (as in contact sports); sometimes, there's a compromise (a role-playing game featuring racism may be accepted if it's being used to train social workers how to deal with racism, but not otherwise). The idea of ludic capital captures this notion quite well. I would caution, however, that sometimes society may find a game morally permissible but individual players don't: you may be fine with an RPG in which your character murders other characters, but not be fine when a quest comes up to rape another character. There's something else at work here, I think, to do with the relationship between a game's designer and its players (what I've called in the past the "covenant").

Overall, though, yes, this is definitely several steps in the right direction!

I am some what torn about this. Richard has brought up some great criticisms as well as pointing out its good points, and yet I find myself quite taken with this approach. I feel that it tells us a lot about 'playing', but perhaps not so much about the nature of Play. AS a framework I can see it being quite useful in the social sciences and, like Richard,
I believe the concept of Ludic Capital will prove to be valuable. It has made me consider skateboarding, an activity that I have often found difficult to classify until this approach.

As an ex-skater I often find myself communicating urban geography with other skaters in relation to architecture and objects (like others) but within the framework of the new meanings we have ascribed to them, e.g. 7 set with handrail or ledge (most people don't remember the number of steps), or an object that has been utilized in a unique way. These new meanings are generated by skaters when they interact with these objects in unconvential ways, and through repetition they become canonised amongst skaters, e.g. ledges are for grinding, steps for jumping etc.I have often wondered was this regnogation of urban landscapes and geography play, or perhaps more pretentiously, art. Of course we can see present here ludic-meaning and ludic-semiotics, but does this example not reveal that this approach demonstrates a link between play and art, or at the very least that play can be art? Not a new idea of course, but an idea that is certainly quite compatible with your framework.

Another reason that skateboarding came to mind was because it raises some interesting questions about the link between ludic capital and the magic circle. Normally skateboarding has little to no ludic capital, and it is always outweighed by institutional capital. Hence skateboarders are accused of destruction of public property, and of being trespassers. This however, is not the case in in a skate park. We can see
then that in two separate contexts, the ludic capital attributed to skateboarding differs signicantly. Perhaps then, magic circles themselves carry with them ludic capital, allowing some to be sanctioned and others not. This seems to be true of other forms of play/games/sport. If we imagine a boxing match played on the street with all the gear and under the same conditions and regulations, the legal ramifications of injuries etc, would differ signifcantly from the same game played in a ring. The same is true for soccer played on a street cornor. It seems that the concept of ludic capital necessitates some form of a magic circle (although perhaps not one we are acoustomed to), and you where wise to retain this feature in your anyalisis. Returning to my orginal example, the irony is that skateboarding was born in urban landscapes, and skaters still feel the 'call of the street'. I believe this drive to skate in an urban landscape is because it is only there that they have the possiability to discover new meaning, to do something that has not been done before (as the parks reflect only the cannon), even if their magic circle infringes upon the everyday life of others. This of course takes me to Thomas' point on
play/games, contingency and late modernity

Truly a joy to read your piece here, Ren. Here are some of my thoughts in response.

First, about play, playfulness, and games: I must confess that I have yet to see a way to make play a useful category for activities in which we engage, and I think that assumption of play as activity is in the background here. In a post in Dec 2008 (and a paper, later published, in connection with it) I argued in favor of seeing play as a mode of experience or disposition, a way of approaching experience. Such an approach may more clearly be described as being about playfulness, rather than play. I wasn't fortunate enough to have comments from you on that post, so maybe it slipped by you during those holidays. :) The post is here:http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2008/12/games-play-and.html

I should also mention that the complementary point to that one about play is that games are quite different, being themselves a "cultural form," like ritual -- a sponsored and culturally shaped event that has a strong but not determinative relationship to playfulness. Just as ritual may (or may not!) bring about a feeling of transcendent belonging, so games may or may not cultivate playfulness.

One of the implications of looking at play as playfulness, it bears noting, addresses the aspect of play that you seek to handle here as well when you say that we can be playing while we're also doing many other kinds of things. I agree that it is vital that our understanding of play(fulness) be able to recognize it wherever it occurs.

As far as what that "it" is, that is a question that relates to a second point of divergence for us, Ren. That is on the issue of meaning. We both agree, I think, that fascinating shifts of meaning happen around play, most obviously in game contexts (where the cultural work of boundary maintenance is often done quite explicitly -- here the Goffmanian idea of framing is quite apt, as I've said before). The examples of boxing and the like point powerfully toward just how distinct such domains can become.

But my concern is that you are reducing games (play, as you put it here) to meaning. For me, playfulness as a disposition is very importantly *not* reducible to shifts in meaning. Playfulness entails a readiness to improvise, such that the basketball player on the court, for example, is situationally playful in how within any given complex moment he or she *acts*, practically. When Oscar Robertson or Julius Erving went above the rim in basketball it was not, primarily, about meaning (although it came to mean something important, of course). It was the doing.

That is not to say that meaning isn't involved in games in a key way. My own view is that games happen to provide a culturally-sanctioned "engine" (in a way) for meaning because of the way they generate legitimately indeterminate events. They also, as I think you are most interested in here, entail a set of understandings about meanings that may lie at odds with meanings in other domains of our lives (what a push means during a hockey game, for example). But if we want to talk about playfulness, then we must have an approach that can cover that deeply practical aspect of the experience of being playful. An approach to the world that is characterized by the expression in utrumque paratus.

Just slightly too late for this to fold into my new book, "Imaginary Games" but I can feedback for your future book at least. :)

I was about to attack your definition for the problems in fitting it to animal play, but as I started to write my critique I could see that I spoke too soon: the "purposeful shift in the dominant meaning" is precisely what happens with mammal play (e.g. mounting behaviour usually means sex, but in play it does not), I think this will work with reptile play as well - not sure about invertebrate play, but this has always been a supremely grey area because hermeneutics of insects and arthropods goes *way* beyond the shallow end of ethology! :)

I personally don't like your "ludic-" compounds... That's partly because I feel "ludic" is a word we studiers of games should use like salt - sparingly. Instead, we end up with extremely salty neologisms which make us look insular (which we might be, but do we *want* to be?!)

But a bigger problem in this regard is that you're talking about 'play', and whatever "ludic" may have meant to the Romans, "ludic = game" by most common usage today. :( You can attempt to "reclaim" the word - but then you expend effort fighting against the tide, and this sort of Canutism is a waste of academic time in my opinion.

If it were me, I would resist the urge to "go Latin" and simply compound the word you mean - I know academics like to think that using Classical Language makes one look clever, but honestly what I think it actually does is make one look pompous. (I appreciate my minority status here!)

So I suggest you 'go simple':

play-meaning - the meaning that has been shifted or attributed
play-semiotics - the system of the signs product through play
play-capital - the degree to which these play-meaning and semiotics are operational in a given context e.g. when set against institutional-capital.

Doing this means you gain instant clarity, lose any pomposity and escape any Canutish battles to reclaim terminology. Looks like a win-win to me. :)

>I particularly like the fact that you keep a concept of the magic circle, which it's fashionable to dismiss

Indeed, I think I’m a founder member of the ‘save the magic circle society’

>but which (as Slowthought points out) is basically Game Studies' way of referring to what Goffman later called "frames".

Basically yes. I’m going to do a longer reply covering Goffman and maybe some others in that area.

>I also like the fact that you recognise that play is a concept in the mind of the individual player, so we could both be playing what we think is the same game but it differs in some details we're not aware of; indeed, it's possible for me to believe I'm playing a game with you when you've stopped playing (eg. hide-and-seek where you couldn't find me so you gave up and went to sleep).

Agreed

>The only place where I disagree with you here concerns whether you can be forced to play something. In my own definition, play is not play when there is duress or obligation involved; the individual is going through the same process as a player, but in my view they are not playing.

This one is tough (this must be my 10th re-write of this bit of the response). I think we are both right and I think I contradicted myself in the original post.

In short: if you are being forced then the thing you are doing might look to everyone to be play, and may function just the same as play for may practical purposes, but would not itself be play. It would be something like hollow-play.

I has given the reason for this, and then forgot it midway through my own writing; the key is “contextual attribution of value”. The play that is forced is like the person buying the bus ticket. They are giving meaning and value to things like the ball going through the net, but the primary value of those things is so they don’t get shot if they don’t play. But, so seductive is play that they might forget that and start to genuinely play.

The reason that I’d moved away from this latter in the post is because intentionality is a very slippery thing generally and particularly in play. In my response to Thomas’s definition I added the notion of ‘ludic intentionality’ - an attitudinal stance to acts of playful intent. This has come in and out of my definition here. One reason is simply circularity, I don’t want to say that play is the thing you do when you are playing.

However I think I’ve put in sufficient mechanics to cover this without needing to label the attitude within the definition. That is, this attitude is one where we really are giving primacy to the internal (i.e. contextual) over the external (i.e. extra-contextual) value of the act.

So I think I want to resurrect ludic-intentionality, but re-define it as the intentional attitude we hold towards acts where the internal meaning and value we attribute to them has primacy over external ones.

I think also we have: ostensible-play or hollow-play. Which is play where the intentional attitude that we hold towards acts holds the external value of those acts over the internal values and meanings.

As noted above, in many cases we may not know which one of these is going on as the different is one of intentionality. But again this very much accords with what is going on with some court cases involving violence within contact sport. As, the hard tackle of A on B might just have been hard or it might have been that A knows that B is sleeping with A’s ex-partner.

What’s more ostensible play can have ludic-capital just in case it looks sufficiently like play for the institutions to apply their usual heuristics. Also spectators might be fooled also – though we do have cases where people thing that sports people are ‘just going through the motions’.

Lastly, and I’ll just tack it on here, this got me thinking about the use of the phrase ‘game playing’ in every day speech. It seems to me this picks out where people are shifting value to either an internal value of a context or what is widely thought to be an inappropriate external one – see ‘institutional politics here.

>I would also quibble as to where to put rules. Your definition places them in games (a particular kind of play) whereas I would place them in play; this is because some non-game play, for example crossword puzzles, also have rules. Do you have any examples of play that doesn't have rules? Even creative play (Sutton-Smith's "play as the imaginary" rhetoric) involves some self-set rules, doesn't it? Or do you mean that games have codified rules?

I was a little imprecise in my wording here and I need to keep at the difference between play and games. I was trying to make the latter point. I was just not explicit about it. I think play does have rules but games codify them. In play the rules are more fluid – see my example of whether the thing getting knocked over is or is not defeated. I need to work up a term for the axis here. Maybe: rule-plasticity, or rule-foregrounding captures it.

>Something you have which I haven't come across before and which is likely to be very useful is this notion of ludic capital. For wider society to accept a game, the wishes of society are set against the wishes of the players. Sometimes, society wins (Russian Roulette is not acceptable); sometimes, the game wins (as in contact sports); sometimes, there's a compromise (a role-playing game featuring racism may be accepted if it's being used to train social workers how to deal with racism, but not otherwise). The idea of ludic capital captures this notion quite well. I would caution, however, that sometimes society may find a game morally permissible but individual players don't: you may be fine with an RPG in which your character murders other characters, but not be fine when a quest comes up to rape another character.

Thanks. This stuff very much came from my research into Duelling and Boxing. Again maybe I was not carful enough in that I think that ludic-capital certainly does operate in the way you mention i.e. different players have differing attitudes. As I understand it this is how the theory social-capital operates i.e. it’s not just a relation between an individual and society it is very much down to the situation in which it is operating (vector like maybe).

>There's something else at work here, I think, to do with the relationship between a game's designer and its players (what I've called in the past the "covenant").
Yes, I’ve not looked at that in a great deal of detail. I’ve certainly thought about games that are co-designed by peer participants and ones where there is an intuitional notion of design such as in organized sport. But I’ve not looked at the kinds of relations in the middle where we can sensibly talk about a player-designer relationship. I like ‘covenant’ but I’ll have to think about it a bit more.

>Overall, though, yes, this is definitely several steps in the right direction! Richard
yay

>First, about play, playfulness, and games: I must confess that I have yet to see a way to make play a useful category for activities in which we engage, and I think that assumption of play as activity is in the background here. In a post in Dec 2008 (and a paper, later published, in connection with it) I argued in favor of seeing play as a mode of experience or disposition, a way of approaching experience. Such an approach may more clearly be described as being about playfulness, rather than play.

In my clarifications to Richard I have re-looked at my own definition and realized that I had included intent in it in respect of our stance (as I’m going to talk about Goffman and Gumperz soon I worry about using that word, I’m not using it here in it’s sociological / socio-linguist sense) to acts.

From an interior point of view I think I probably agree with you that play is ‘indeed a mode of experience or disposition’ however where we disagree is that I think as a matter of practice we do characterise activities and I think that we can sufficiently bring these two things together so the definition can usefully encompass both. However as I’ve noted in the post and the reply to Richard it is exceedingly hard to be sure we are accurately picking out the right things as member of the category – but as we know from epistemology, anything that involves intentionality falls beyond the sceptical gap. I should write a paper called Zombie Football just on this last point (c.f. David Chalmers).

So it might just be that I’m taking a more pragmatic stance to the definition – this did come from a need to explain some points in my analysis of law.

Sorry about missing that one at the time and not linking to it here – which is really odd as I had it on my screen while editing my post, I’ll add it to our conversation list above.

> I should also mention that the complementary point to that one about play is that games are quite different, being themselves a "cultural form," like ritual -- a sponsored and culturally shaped event that has a strong but not determinative relationship to playfulness. Just as ritual may (or may not!) bring about a feeling of transcendent belonging, so games may or may not cultivate playfulness.

Again in my response to Richard I talk about Ostensible-play – this is something that people may very well be engaged in when engaged in the game.

In that response I was focused more on the play bit than the game bit. So I agreed that in the case of any given individual there is a contingent relationship between play (their disposition) and game (the cultural form). However, where I see the stronger link between the concepts is in the characteristic of the cultural form. That is, when an institution looks at something and categorises it as a game I suggest that and necessary and essential thing that is going on is that they are categorising it as a form of play that has the internal normative characteristics that I’ve outlined. One reason I look at law here is because I think it illustrates this well.

So I think that the concept of game relies on the concept of play, but that an instance of characterising a given set of activities as a game does not rely on the actors playing. That even hurts my head.

> One of the implications of looking at play as playfulness, it bears noting, addresses the aspect of play that you seek to handle here as well when you say that we can be playing while we're also doing many other kinds of things. I agree that it is vital that our understanding of play(fulness) be able to recognize it wherever it occurs.

ok

> As far as what that "it" is, that is a question that relates to a second point of divergence for us, Ren. That is on the issue of meaning. We both agree, I think, that fascinating shifts of meaning happen around play, most obviously in game contexts (where the cultural work of boundary maintenance is often done quite explicitly -- here the Goffmanian idea of framing is quite apt, as I've said before). The examples of boxing and the like point powerfully toward just how distinct such domains can become. But my concern is that you are reducing games (play, as you put it here) to meaning. For me, playfulness as a disposition is very importantly *not* reducible to shifts in meaning. Playfulness entails a readiness to improvise, such that the basketball player on the court, for example, is situationally playful in how within any given complex moment he or she *acts*, practically. When Oscar Robertson or Julius Erving went above the rim in basketball it was not, primarily, about meaning (although it came to mean something important, of course). It was the doing. That is not to say that meaning isn't involved in games in a key way. My own view is that games happen to provide a culturally-sanctioned "engine" (in a way) for meaning because of the way they generate legitimately indeterminate events. They also, as I think you are most interested in here, entail a set of understandings about meanings that may lie at odds with meanings in other domains of our lives (what a push means during a hockey game, for example). But if we want to talk about playfulness, then we must have an approach that can cover that deeply practical aspect of the experience of being playful. An approach to the world that is characterized by the expression in utrumque paratus.

It is difficult to argue this point as we both think there is a lot in the other’s view but we place the primary emphasis on different parts. It might be that one or both of us has un-expressed elements of our respective definitions that the other is finding it hard to see.

I say this because when I look at my definition as a whole I feel that the notions that you talk about above, such as improvisation, are taken into account, or at minimum I see things as supervening (that might not be the right term) upon the practice.

You say “When Oscar Robertson or Julius Erving went above the rim in basketball it was not, primarily, about meaning”. I don’t know who these people are or what they did. A google inspired guess would be that they were basketball players who were notable for scoring by putting the ball down into the basket and mb doing something after that or doing it in a theatrical way. If so – why were they putting the ball through the hoop if it did not mean something?

It might be that for me ‘meaning’ is a pretty foundational concept that I find necessary at the heart of many things I discuss – I think to explain this I’d have to take a side road down into a bunch of philosophy.

> I am some what torn about this. Richard has brought up some great criticisms as well as pointing out its good points, and yet I find myself quite taken with this approach.

I hope in my reply to Richard I’ve closed the gap.

> I feel that it tells us a lot about 'playing', but perhaps not so much about the nature of Play.
This may be true, as I note there is a lot that I have not said and a lot that this approach probably does not help with, but I hope that other approaches are at least compatible with this one e.g. if we talked about the phycology of play.

>AS a framework I can see it being quite useful in the social sciences and, like Richard, I believe the concept of Ludic Capital will prove to be valuable. It has made me consider skateboarding, an activity that I have often found difficult to classify until this approach. As an ex-skater I often find myself communicating urban geography with other skaters in relation to architecture and objects (like others) but within the framework of the new meanings we have ascribed to them, e.g. 7 set with handrail or ledge (most people don't remember the number of steps), or an object that has been utilized in a unique way. These new meanings are generated by skaters when they interact with these objects in unconvential ways, and through repetition they become canonised amongst skaters, e.g. ledges are for grinding, steps for jumping etc. I have often wondered was this regnogation of urban landscapes and geography play, or perhaps more pretentiously, art.

I did have some of this in mind, hence my reference to the built environment. As a one time skater myself (tho not a good one) and someone that’s ARG’d a little and of course played things like Foresquare and with Layer, I’m interested in this notion of the built environment being a pay space and being able to move in and out of these views of the world.

> Of course we can see present here ludic-meaning and ludic-semiotics, but does this example not reveal that this approach demonstrates a link between play and art, or at the very least that play can be art?

I’m actually writing a paper on the aesthetics of games – in short I argue that gameplay is a distinct category of aesthetic experience, and (Richard might like this) I get very much into the relationship between designer as artist and player, and the co-creative nature of the experience.

> Not a new idea of course, but an idea that is certainly quite compatible with your framework. Another reason that skateboarding came to mind was because it raises some interesting questions about the link between ludic capital and the magic circle. Normally skateboarding has little to no ludic capital, and it is always outweighed by institutional capital. Hence skateboarders are accused of destruction of public property, and of being trespassers. This however, is not the case in in a skate park. We can see then that in two separate contexts, the ludic capital attributed to skateboarding differs signicantly. Perhaps then, magic circles themselves carry with them ludic capital, allowing some to be sanctioned and others not. This seems to be true of other forms of play/games/sport. If we imagine a boxing match played on the street with all the gear and under the same conditions and regulations, the legal ramifications of injuries etc, would differ signifcantly from the same game played in a ring. The same is true for soccer played on a street cornor. It seems that the concept of ludic capital necessitates some form of a magic circle (although perhaps not one we are acoustomed to), and you where wise to retain this feature in your anyalisis.

Indeed I was trying to keep hold of the idea that the ludic capital is very much depending upon the given network of actors and given situation. I think, I think that things are the other way round from the way you put it, I think that the term magic circle is a way of pointing out where ludic-capital is operating.

> Returning to my orginal example, the irony is that skateboarding was born in urban landscapes, and skaters still feel the 'call of the street'. I believe this drive to skate in an urban landscape is because it is only there that they have the p ossiability to discover new meaning, to do something that has not been done before (as the parks reflect only the cannon), even if their magic circle infringes upon the everyday life of others. This of course takes me to Thomas' point on play/games, contingency and late modernity

As I’ve noted in the post and above, I’ve not gotten into why people play or the many benefits that they gain from it. That’s not because I don’t think these are important it’s just not the work I was trying to do here.

As it happens I agree with you that what non-skaters often don’t get about skating is that gives us fresh and exciting access to oft familiar environments and enables us to stand in a different relationship to the environment. Trying also to bring all this together I think this is exactly what the modernist view of art was about i.e. that it gives us access to seeing things differently. But that’s just me talking not theorising.

>Ren: Just slightly too late for this to fold into my new book, "Imaginary Games"
Doh

And if only commentators could use the ‘shameless self promotion’ tag too – a find TN tradition ;)

>but I can feedback for your future book at least. :)
yay

>I was about to attack your definition for the problems in fitting it to animal play, but as I started to write my critique I could see that I spoke too soon: the "purposeful shift in the dominant meaning" is precisely what happens with mammal play (e.g. mounting behaviour usually means sex, but in play it does not), I think this will work with reptile play as well - not sure about invertebrate play, but this has always been a supremely grey area because hermeneutics of insects and arthropods goes *way* beyond the shallow end of ethology! :)

As I noted I’m not 100% sure about the application of what I’ve said to either animal play or early infant play. I’m not saying it does not apply but rather that these are areas that I don’t have sufficient knowledge to make strong claims about. But I’m happy that you seem to go along with me at least in part.

I look forward to reading you work – I really need to get my paper on games and aesthetics out. I started it a year ago but life got in the way and I never completed it. I might put the essence of it in a post so we can all argue about it here.

> I personally don't like your "ludic-" compounds... That's partly because I feel "ludic" is a word we studiers of games should use like salt - sparingly. Instead, we end up with extremely salty neologisms which make us look insular (which we might be, but do we *want* to be?!) But a bigger problem in this regard is that you're talking about 'play', and whatever "ludic" may have meant to the Romans, "ludic = game" by most common usage today. :( You can attempt to "reclaim" the word - but then you expend effort fighting against the tide, and this sort of Canutism is a waste of academic time in my opinion. If it were me, I would resist the urge to "go Latin" and simply compound the word you mean - I know academics like to think that using Classical Language makes one look clever, but honestly what I think it actually does is make one look pompous. (I appreciate my minority status here!) So I suggest you 'go simple': play-meaning - the meaning that has been shifted or attributed play-semiotics - the system of the signs product through play play-capital - the degree to which these play-meaning and semiotics are operational in a given context e.g. when set against institutional-capital. Doing this means you gain instant clarity, lose any pomposity and escape any Canutish battles to reclaim terminology. Looks like a win-win to me. :)

The ludic is in part branding. I think that ludic-capital is find as there I am mainly talking about games and not play. You are right that play-meaning and play-semiotics are more precise terms but I’m not sure I’m a big fan of how they sound – which really is just personal stuff. I’ll think about the best terms.

Ren: yes, it never occurred to me that comments might benefit from tags before now, but I couldn't resist a little SSP here since I read your post literally *minutes* after sending off my manuscript for feedback. ;)

Getting terminology that you are comfortable with is half the battle; getting terminology that other people will be happy with is the other half. This task is always entirely impossible. :p

If I see anything on game aesthetics on Terra Nova you can bet I'll wade in, so go ahead if you have the time to set it up!

Ren>In short: if you are being forced then the thing you are doing might look to everyone to be play, and may function just the same as play for may practical purposes, but would not itself be play. It would be something like hollow-play.

Yes, you'd be going through the motions but not actually playing. It's not just duress where this can happen, of course - you might be "pretending to play" for some reason (eg. undercover research) but all the while not actually playing.

>the key is “contextual attribution of value”. The play that is forced is like the person buying the bus ticket. They are giving meaning and value to things like the ball going through the net, but the primary value of those things is so they don’t get shot if they don’t play. But, so seductive is play that they might forget that and start to genuinely play.

Yes, I agree they could actually start to play, in the same way that an undercover cop could "go native" and subscribe to the views of the people being surveilled.

>this attitude is one where we really are giving primacy to the internal (i.e. contextual) over the external (i.e. extra-contextual) value of the act.

Hmm... So what about the case of a parent whose child asks to play Snakes and Ladders? The parent knows there is no skill involved and it's a boring game, but decides to play because they like to see their child happy. Are they truly playing, though? It's unlikely that they could ever really get into the game enough to give it contextual value, because they know it's completely random (the child, of course, doesn't know this and is playing by any definition of the word). I'd say that the parent probably is playing, because they're doing it willingly and for some perceived benefit (they like to see their child happy); under your definition, it wouldn't be play, though? It looks like what you call "ostensible play".

>Also spectators might be fooled also

Heh, yes, my grandfather used to watch the wrestling on TV and thought it was actually a contest...

>I think play does have rules but games codify them.

OK, I'll go along with that.

>I like ‘covenant’ but I’ll have to think about it a bit more.

I mentioned it in Magdeburg a couple of years ago. Academic publishing being what it is, the book containing the formal paper isn't out until later this year, but the slides are here.

So glad you chased down the Goffman. I'm jotting this quickly before I head off to lecture, so I apologize if duplicate an recommendations already made.

I'll share via email a syllabus for a graduate seminar I teach on performance and practice theory that gets at the very questions you are left with, in particular the notion of *process* that you so rightly want to capture in your model but which, to a significant extent, Goffman has trouble handling.

In the meantime, the next thing you might want to look at which follows from a develops the Goffman is a book called Verbal Art as Performance, by Richard Bauman. It's a very slim, readable book that pushes these ideas toward an idea of performance as *emergent*, that is, as processual. Here's a link to the Amazon page for it:http://www.amazon.com/Verbal-Art-Performance-Richard-Bauman/dp/0881330485

One other note: Yes, you are right to see that you diverge from Goffman on the issue of the centrality of meaning. That is because his fundamentally dramaturgical metaphor (introduced in his landmark The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life) inevitably incorporates the practical (and material!) aspects in any given interaction that contribute to what he calls the "definition of the situation."

On that score, as you know, I'm prone to "side" with Goffman, but as you say, we don't really disagree – it's simply that you are particularly interested in the shifts of meaning that become possible under conditions of playfulness. I applaud that; I'm just trying to make sure that our understanding of these phenomena leaves enough room for all the work that needs to be done.